Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat, The Flint Sit-Down Strike

On the night of December thirtieth, nineteen thirty-six, workers at General Motors' Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan, stopped the production line, turned off their machines, and sat down. They did not go home. They occupied the factory.

The Flint sit-down strike had begun. The tactic was deliberate. If the workers simply walked off the job, GM could bring in replacement workers and restart production.

By occupying the plant, the strikers held the machinery itself, and the dies used to stamp car body panels were irreplaceable. No dies, no production anywhere. General Motors was then the largest corporation in the world.

Its Flint complex was the center of American automobile manufacturing. The United Auto Workers union, organizing under the Congress of Industrial Organizations, had less than thirty thousand members. They were challenging a company with resources that dwarfed their own and a management that had, for decades, successfully resisted unionization through a combination of company unions, informants, and firings.

The sit-down lasted forty-four days. Workers inside the plants slept on car seats and were fed by families and supporters outside. GM sought an injunction to force them out; a local judge was discovered to own two hundred thousand dollars in GM stock, and the injunction collapsed.

Governor Frank Murphy, facing enormous pressure from both the company and the Roosevelt administration, refused to send the National Guard to evict the workers by force. Diplomacy, Murphy said, had to be given a chance. On February eleventh, nineteen thirty-seven, GM signed a contract with the UAW recognizing it as the bargaining agent for its workers.

It was the most significant labor victory in American history to that point. Within months, Chrysler had also signed. Within the year, over four hundred sit-down strikes had taken place across the country in industries that had seemed permanently resistant to unionization.

The autoworkers of Flint did not just win a contract. They established the principle that mass-production workers had the right to collective bargaining, and they did it by sitting still.